On the heels of the State of the Union address, NCTQ released yesterday the 2009 State Teacher Policy Yearbook, our third annual review of what states are doing to help-and hinder-teacher quality. This year's report is a comprehensive analysis of the full range of each state's teacher policies, measured, as always, against a realistic blueprint for reform.
The release is particularly timely in light of last week's deadline for the first round of Race to the Top funding. While the national focus on teacher quality has never been greater, the Yearbook shines a light on the current status of state laws, rules and regulations that govern the teaching profession.
And the findings are bleak. States have tremendous ground to make up in areas such as teacher preparation, evaluation, tenure and dismissal, alternative certification and compensation after years of policy neglect.
The average overall grade awarded this year is a D, with 40 states earning a grade in the D range. Florida earned the highest overall grade, a C. Other states moving in the right direction are Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, all of which received an overall grade of C-. (It shouldn't be a surprise to see a few of the Race to the Top frontrunners among our higher scorers.) Three states (Maine, Montana and Vermont) earned an F.
This year's 52 volumes (one for each state, the District of Columbia and a national summary) extend to over 8,000 pages. Here are a few examples of what's inside:
- States are complicit in keeping ineffective teachers in the classroom. 38 states explicitly and 8 implicitly, by unclear policies, allow multiple appeals of dismissals, taking away from those with educational expertise decisions about who stays and who goes and making it too difficult for districts to attempt to dismiss poor performers.
- Few states' alternate routes to certification provide a genuine alternative pathway into the teaching profession. Although all but one state claim they have an alternate route, only five states offer a real alternative that provides an accelerated, responsible and flexible pathway to licensure for talented individuals.
- States fail to exercise appropriate oversight of their teacher preparation programs. Although 46 states require teacher candidates to pass a basic skills test in order to receive a license, only 15 states make such a test a condition of admission into a teacher preparation program, with the result that programs spend too much time remediating skill deficits and not enough time preparing teachers for the classroom.
The 51 state Yearbook reports and the national summary are available for download at: www.nctq.org/stpy.
WHEN IT COMES TO LICENSING TESTS, WE NEED THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON
The need to raise entry standards into the teaching profession is generally met with nods of approval--that is, until forced to confront the ugly, sharp distinctions between and Black and White test performance and the challenge reconciling what often appear to be two competing needs: high standards and a diverse teaching force.
A recent paper published in the AERA Journal by economists Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen (a finalist in NCTQ's 2009 TR3 research competition) complicates matters even further. Three main take aways:
Looking at the test performance of 4,000 teachers in Grades 4 through 6 on North Carolina's two required Praxis II exams (both tests are mostly focused on pedagogy, with only a smattering of content), they find that licensure tests do a pretty poor job of predicting which teachers, regardless of their race, will produce gains in students' reading performance. Conversely, they do a good job of predicting which teachers will produce gains in students' math performance.
Second, the two licensing tests used in North Carolina--and presumably all 122 (!) licensing tests offered by the Educational Testing Service and other companies-- differ in their ability to predict teacher effectiveness. In this case, White teachers did better on the test that was in a multiple choice format whereas Black teachers did better on the test comprising essay questions.
Third, and this is where their findings offer critically important implications for policy: Black teachers, even though their scores on the licensing tests were lower, turned out to be just as good, if not better, than a lot of White teachers with higher scores. This finding is particularly pronounced when Black teachers are assigned to teach Black children.
Goldhaber and Hansen hypothesize that student performance would be better in a majority Black classroom taught by a Black female teacher who has failed the licensing tests than by a White female teacher who (barely) passed the tests. It turns out that the Black teacher would get the greatest student gains, and significantly so. The relative effectiveness of the Black teacher would decrease, but only marginally, if the number of White children in the hypothetical classroom increased. The Black teacher's effectiveness would not be equaled in the classroom by substitution with a White teacher until the White replacement was one who had scored well on the licensing tests.
Pedagogy tests predict teacher performance better on math than reading...White teachers do better on such tests in multiple choice format tests, while Black teachers do better in essay format...Black teachers under-perform on such tests relative to their actual effectiveness...Black children perform better for Black teachers. Without a doubt, the way to craft policies designed to increase the potential for student achievement in view of these findings is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
INDIANA INTRODUCES SWEEPING CHANGES FOR TEACHER LICENSING
Earlier this month, an Indiana state panel that supervises teacher licensing in the state successfully swept aside many of the more arcane rules governing teacher certification-remnants of the "Sue-Ellen" era that her replacement, new schools superintendent Tony Bennett, is determined to change.
The new policies mirror NCTQ's recommendations for states seeking to modernize their rules.
From now on, teacher candidates in Indiana will only be allowed to major in education if the education school's content requirements meet or exceed the content requirements of a subject major that non-teachers on that same campus must pursue.
The new regulations signal a dramatic end to the state's long held distaste for alternate routes. Now, teacher candidates with a baccalaureate degree in any subject can receive a license by taking an education minor (roughly 15 credit hours) and passing a content-knowledge test. This new provision will make it much easier for districts to hire so called "profession changers."
Bennett also attempted to sharply curtail the amount of professional coursework an education school could require, but his rather untenable proposal of only 15 to 18 credits of professional coursework went down with a thud.
DUMPING ON TEACHERS DOESN'T PAY OFF IN BALTIMORE COUNTY
Teachers in Baltimore County, Maryland have been up in arms and for good reason. In a classic school district blunder, the 6,000 plus teacher corps was informed in December that, on top of the traditional report cards, they would have to complete a new reporting requirement each grading period: an exercise that involves rating each one of their students on over 100 different specific skills.
The thinking, as we understand it, was to give parents way more information than any sane parent should want on little Johnnie or Tanesha's progress.
The real blow was delivered to high school teachers who typically have class rosters of 100 or more students. They would be logging in each quarter some 10,000 individual assessments of skills.
Disticts-Gone-Wild!--perhaps more accurately known as the "Articulated Instruction Module"--was developed by a Baltimore County district administrator, Barbara Dezmon, reputedly during her free time. In a legal agreement with the district, Dezmon retains the copyright on her innovation, provided the county got to use it for free. However, other districts as eager to antagonize their teachers will have to pay for the privilege.
A Facebook protest group, "End AIM Now," was started on January 2 and already has over 1,700 members. The teachers' union also organized a petition and ran a letter writing campaign directed at decision makers and the media. The protesting paid off this week with an announcement from the superintendent that no implementation will take place until a committee studies the matter further.
JUST WHEN WE FORGOT WHAT HQT EVEN MEANS!
A recent U.S. Department of Education scuffle with Texas once again reveals more problems with the "highly qualified teacher" designation.
The genesis is the provision under NCLB stating that elementary teachers need to pass a broad test of subject matter to be considered highly qualified. True to form, but a big reason why there's not much substance to the HQT designation, Congress left it up to individual states to define what an elementary teacher actually is.
Unlike many states which define elementary as PK-5, Texas had indicated to the US ED that it considers elementary grades as PK-6...and subsequently shot itself in the foot.
Here's how. In Texas, a teacher in upper elementary grades can elect to become certified not just under its PK-4 credential but under a Grade 4-8 credential. Teachers choosing this latter route have the option of taking a single subject matter exam--reflecting a bit of confusion on the part of the state as to whether these teachers are more like middle school teachers or elementary teachers. For teachers who work in departmentalized middle schools, the single-subject test is the more logical choice, and better demonstrates their knowledge of the only subject they will teach.
But logic doesn't matter. Since Texas told the feds that it has defined elementary as PK-6, these teachers, classified as "elementary" aren't meeting the letter of the law.
US ED is insisting that many of the teachers caught up in this little mess, most of them 6th grade teachers, must now pass a multi-subject test. For its part, the state is disputing how many teachers will have to do so.
Meanwhile, Texas is phasing in a new elementary certification which will extend to 6th grade, but it isn't actually intending to do anything to fix the misalignment of Grade 4-8 certification with federal law.
TFA TOUTS LOUISIANA DATA, THIS TIME GETTING IT RIGHT
A few months ago, we criticized a much ballyhooed study out of Louisiana. That study claimed that teachers coming out of the Teaching Fellows' alternative certification program were stronger teachers than teachers coming out of other nontraditional programs, but the study failed to ensure that teachers had the same level of experience. In effect, it compared second-year teachers from the Teaching Fellows program, a cohort that included significant numbers of Teach for America corps members, with first-year teachers from the other programs--a patently unfair comparison.
Now TFA has come out with new data to correct the earlier misleading study, and in fact the TFA corps members going through the Teaching Fellows program still look pretty darn good.
This time with the researchers controlling for experience, TFA teachers were found to be more effective, raising test scores by an average of 4.5 more points in math over non-TFA teachers. When compared with the general teaching population, the data also shows TFA teacher to be slightly more effective; however, the differences were not statistically significant.
The study also examines rates of retention, and here the news is unsurprisingly not so good. TFA teachers were much less likely to stay in Louisiana and teach than other teachers. In some years, the TFA retention rate was as low as 4 percent after five years, compared with 65 percent for non-TFA teachers.
TEACHER HIRING: MOVING PAST ROLLING THE DICE
For years, the driving organizational push of Teach For America has been to figure out how to select individuals into its program who have what it takes to move at-risk students ahead not one, but two or three grade levels in a single year. The January issue of The Atlantic takes an interesting look at that process, examining TFA's relentless pursuit to be the first to answer that question.
While TFA acknowledges the inherent imprecision involved in predicting good teachers, it sees the question settled on two points. Individuals who have a history of both perseverance and previous success are more likely to be successful teachers. Previous success is manifested in high GPAs and leadership roles. Whereas most studies over the years have not found high GPA to be a predictor of an effective teacher, within TFA's realm of candidates, it matters quite a bit. Perhaps that is because TFA teachers all come from highly selective institutions and none come from education schools, notorious for their easy A's. Other qualities that many school districts interpret as a signal of a strong candidate, such as prior experience working with children, don't matter a whit.
A new study from the Journal of Positive Psychology looking at 390 TFA teachers confirms what TFA has learned internally about key personality traits. That study measured grit (perseverance and passion for long-term goals), optimistic explanatory style (how positively a person reacts in the face of adversity) and life satisfaction (contentment with one's current life situation) . Grit and life satisfaction made the most difference in student learning outcomes.
VAM ESTIMATES ARE REASONABLE FACTORS IN TENURE DECISION
In our second paper this month from Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen, our star-studded team explores the potential for using valued added models in making personnel decisions such as tenure.
The policy question before districts--as they begin to get increasingly better data--concerns the reliability of using value-added data to judge teacher performance. More specifically, can districts fairly assess a teacher's early-career performance as a reliable measure of how they'll perform in future years?
Drawing upon the same group of teachers as for the teacher licensing and race paper (4th and 5th grades), Goldhaber and Hansen find that teachers who start out much better than their peers tend to stay much better than their peers in future years. Teachers who are much worse continue to hover at the bottom.
It would appear that districts looking to make good decisions about who to keep or not to keep at a four- or even three-year tenure mark can be pretty confident that they are making a fair decision. However any decision absent at least two years worth of data is likely premature and unfair.
Goldhaber and Hansen throw in this useful fact. If districts held to their guns, ensuring that the bottom performing 25 percent of all teachers up for tenure each year didn't earn it (in effect about 13 percent more than currently don't earn tenure), student achievement could be significantly improved. By routinely denying tenure to the bottom 25 percent of eligible teachers, the impact on student achievement would be equivalent to reducing class size across-the-board by 5 students a class...an intervention that comes with a lot lower price tag.
BOOK REVIEW: CREATING A NEW TEACHING PROFESSION
By Rob Rickenbrode, NCTQ
Dan Goldhaber's and Jane Hannaway's new compilation of essays, Creating a New Teaching Profession, crackles early with potential. The essays are divided into three sections:(1) those that make the case for a strong focus on human capital issues in K-12 by examining historical trends and projections, international practices, and private sector lessons; (2) those that suggest reform ideas; and, (3) those that comment on and react to the first two groups.
We found much to learn in the first two sections of the book, not so much in the wrap up.
In "Human Capital Policy and the Quality of the Teacher Workforce," New York University's Sean Corcoran raises important concerns about barriers to entry in teaching programs, pointing to studies demonstrating that states with more rigorous teacher testing do not, on average, have higher-aptitude teachers and yet another where stronger licensing requirements apparently reduced overall teacher supply and the average quality of teachers. Perhaps, Corcoran theorizes, highly-skilled graduates may be disproportionately dissuaded by higher preparation costs and the need to invest in skills that may not be transferrable to other careers.
In "Lessons from Abroad: Exploring Cross-Country Differences in Teacher Development Systems and What They Mean for U.S. Policy," Dan Goldhaber uses international comparisons to demonstrate, among other things, that there is little relationship between student achievement and teacher salaries or between the length of field experiences (a prominent reform initiative in the U.S) and country average levels of student achievement.
Rick Hess systematically identifies current assumptions around teacher preparation and imagines a reality where many are reversed or abandoned entirely, such as: that most new teachers should be recent college graduates intent on making a career of full-time classroom instruction or career changers with some professional work experience; that most teachers should be generalists, expected to juggling a broad array of tasks, responsibilities, and duties or increasingly specialized practitioners; or that new compensation models should be based on finer-gradations of hierarchies of educators and crude value-added metrics or based on the skills and training required to specialize.
Eric Hanushek, using a title and phrase guaranteed to prevent constructive conversation, "Teacher Deselection," (in fairness we have no alternative to proffer) describes and quantifies a process of systematically and permanently removing a small percentage of very low-performing teachers that could improve U.S. student achievement relatively quickly, pay for itself, and, except for the will, can be done soon.
There are a few early misses, such as Alan Blinder's suggestion to focus more on teaching creativity, spontaneity, communications, and interpersonal relations to prepare our children for a future job market with (relatively) more service jobs that cannot be sent offshore--we are not certain that learning standards should include spontaneity.
The book fizzles at the end, where notables--a dean of an education school, an urban superintendent, a teacher's union leader, and a policy wonk--comment on the political and operational feasibility of the ideas in the earlier essays. Here, this reader was left with an uncomfortable feeling that relatively little is possible, not as a result of the analyses in this section, but because of the sense that the commentators have not grown or changed significantly in considering the earlier ideas-that the reactions could have been written without consideration of the earlier works.
It could be said that Creating a New Teaching Profession serves as a microcosm of the current education reform movement, where there is no lack of compelling ideas put forward by earnest reformers talking past each other.
Creating a New Teaching Profession
Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway, editors
Urban Institute, 2009
FEMALE TEACHERS' UNFORTUNATE LEGACY TO YOUNG GIRLS
Women won the vote in 1920, pushed for equality in the 60's, and today out-number their male counterparts in college enrollment. We've come along way, ladies, but according to a University of Chicago study, numbers still make us nervous.
The study, which looked at 17 first and second grade female teachers and 117 of their students--65 girls and 52 boys--found that the teachers' own math anxiety had a troubling influence on the young girls in their classes. Asked to draw pictures of students who were good at math or reading, the girls who had been taught by the more math-anxious teachers were more apt to draw boys doing math well and girls doing well in reading. More importantly, they scored significantly lower than their peers on the final arithmetic-based test.
Researchers acknowledged that young children also learn gender-biases at home, but argued that teachers are in a position to confirm or dispute those stereotypes, making stronger preparation in mathematics for teachers across the board essential.
Study: Female teachers' math anxiety affects girl students
Kristen Mack,
Chicago Tribune, January 25, 2010
Little girls are made of sugar and spice, and learn out math is not nice
Carina Storrs,
Scientific American, January 25, 2010
Female teachers may pass on math anxiety to girls, study finds
Karen Kaplan,
LA Times, January 26, 2010
ALL-IN FOR STEM TEACHER PREPARATION
Obama upped the ante for his administration's commitment to putting more math and science teachers in the classroom, pledging another $250 million to improve STEM teacher preparation. The move augments an already promised $250 million as well as the hefty $700 million that flows through agencies like NASA and NSF for the same purpose.
With this new pledge, the administration seeks to prepare 10,000 new STEM teachers in five years and provide on-the-job training to 100,000 more. Among the new programs and expansions: UTeach will grow by $13.5 million and public ed schools will prepare 3,000 more teachers than previously planned. On board with the plan are organizations like the Intel Foundation, which will put $200 million into their 80-hour math course to better train elementary teachers over the next 10 years.
NCTQ WELCOMES COLORADO LT. GOVERNOR TO BOARD
We are very pleased to welcome long-time education advocate and leader, Barbara O'Brien, to our Board of Directors. As the 47th Lieutenant Governor of Colorado, Barbara O'Brien oversees education reform efforts for pre-school to post-secondary education, specifically leading the state's effort on its Race to the Top application. Previously, the Lieutenant Governor headed the Colorado Children's Campaign for 16 years and held leadership positions at the university level. Welcome!
TQ Bulletin Volume 11, Number 1
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TQBulletin is a monthly publication of the National Council on Teacher Quality, nonpartisan research and advocacy group committed to restructuring the teaching profession, led by our vision that every child deserves effective teachers.
Cartoons by David Flanagan
To subscribe to or unsubscribe from TQ Bulletin, or to send questions, comments, or suggestions, please e-mail TQBulletin@nctq.org.
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2009 State Teacher Policy Yearbook |
| NCTQ's annual 52-volume report on state policies that impact the teaching profession. This year's edition is a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of states' teacher policies including key policy areas such as teacher preparation, evaluation, tenure and dismissal, alternative certification and compensation. |
| + Visit the website |
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Tackling the STEM crisis: Five steps your state can take to improve the quality and quantity of its K-12 math and science teachers, June 2009 |
| Strong K-12 math and science preparation ensures that college freshmen are capable of diving into demanding STEM* majors rather than treading water in remedial courses. That's better for them and for our nation's future. State laws and regulations can help to build a bigger and better pipeline of K-12 teachers who will savor, not skirt, rigorous math and science instruction.
*Science, technology, engineering and mathematics |
| + Download the report |
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State Teacher Policy Yearbook 2008 |
| A 51-volume encyclopedia--with a handy national summary--that takes an unparalleled look at what states are doing to improve teacher quality and a blueprint for reform. |
| + Visit the website |
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No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools, June 2008 |
| American students' chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test. |
| + Download the Executive Summary |
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Teacher Rules, Roles and Rights |
| National Council on Teacher Quality's groundbreaking online database. Explore the intricacies of collective bargaining agreements, board policies, and teacher handbooks from the nation's 50 largest school districts, educating 16 percent (over 8 million) of all school children, employing nearly 500,000 teachers and operating 11,000 schools. |
| + Visit the website |
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State Teacher Policy Yearbook 2007 |
| The first edition of the State Teacher Policy Yearbook 2007 provides both an unprecedented analyses of the teacher policies in every state as well as an ambitious but realistic blueprint for reform. |
| + Visit the website |
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Alternative Certification Isn't Alternative, September 2007 |
| A new report from NCTQ and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, examines the current realities of alternate routes, originally intended as a fast track way to get talented individuals into teaching. |
| + Download the pdf |
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What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning |
| In this groundbreaking report, NCTQ studied a large representative sampling of ed schools to find out what future elementary teachers are--and are not--learning about reading instruction. The report, the most comprehensive of its kind, determined that education schools are ignoring the principles of good reading instruction that would prepare prospective teachers how to better teach reading. |
| + Download the Executive Summary |
